Nigel Lythgoe Considering Voting Changes For American Idol 2012

Nigel Lythgoe, executive producer of American Idol, sat down with Zap2It for an interview on SYTYCD. Along the way they asked him about Idol’s voting system. While he sounded potentially interested in correcting an obviously faulty system I’m still not convinced that will ever happen.

For next season, Lythgoe’s mulling over the voting process. “I am going to be interested in listening to one device, one vote, each week,” he says. “Voting will be discussed. It is unique to ‘Idol,’ the way we have it now.”

If it did change, “we would never be able to boast again 72 million votes in a night.”

And that last line right there is why I’ve said over and over that they’ll never change the voting system. It’s a useless, inflated metric, but they still do it anyway. They might as well be handing out Schrute Bucks for each vote.

So instead of making the voting meaningful and representative they’ll keep it as is for the momentary ego stroke of Ryan making that announcement. Yes, I think they care more about their egos than they do about the show’s legitimacy.